Brewing In A Bedsitter

Thursday, 27 July 2017

I just noticed that it's about six months since I posted my To Brew list. As much for my own interest as anyone else's, I thought I'd run through what I've done since then, and what the current list of ideas looks like.

Well, since January I've brewed:

The American Amber that was in the fermenter last time. It took a while for the flavour of the crystal malt to smooth out, by which point the hops had lost their edge a bit. Fairly respectable, but I probably wouldn't brew it the same way again.

A second bash at Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby. Alright but a bit boring - I was hoping for something really rich and fruity, which didn't happen. The search for a really good strong mild recipe continues.

A vienna-rye IPA with citra and simcoe. Really good - big fruit from the hops, but with a nice, rich, spicy base. I'm going to re-use the basic idea here, possibly with different hops.

A golden ale - basically Extra Pale Maris Otter and lots of Challenger hops. Nice enough, although the plan to get more of an idea of what Challenger really tastes like by going heavy on the late hops didn't really work. Apparently it tastes like beer.

A kettle sour that ended up getting drain-poured. Ironically, I think it was using US-05 for the main fermentation during a heatwave that actually killed it.

A rye saison with saaz. I've only just bottled this, but the sample tasted good.

Of the plans that haven't happened, the mirto milk stout still seems like a good idea - the spicy blueberry flavour of the myrtle berries should be a good fit for a sweet and roasty beer - but it's not really a priority to get it brewed so it keeps not happening. The idea for the Euro-Hopped blonde sort of evolved into the golden ale, and the red rye IPA into the vienna rye thing. I still like the idea of brewing something historic - more of that later!

So what else is on the list now?

First up, on accounts of not having a brewfridge I'm basically stuck with saisons if the weather's hot. Maybe a version of the rye / saaz thing but with fruity New Zealand hops? Maybe something autumnal with golden naked oats and Bramling Cross? Maybe something nice and simple to bottle with brett?

Next, I'm definitely planning on brewing a Victorian mild recipe - possibly the Lovibond XX from Ron Pattinson's book. The local homebrew club are doing a theme of "mild, porter and stout" in November, so it'd be fun to mess with the brief by bringing something strong and pale.

I'd also like to brew a lightly hopped Belgian pale ale and bottle it with Brett. Bottling with Brett (rather than pitching it into secondary) saves a lot of worries about infecting your regular fermenter, but comes with the risk of exploding bottles if there's too much stuff left in the beer for the brett to eat. The idea here would be to use swingtops, open one every few weeks to check that they aren't going gushy, and vent them if they are. Future iterations of the recipe could tweak the priming sugar and/or the recipe to get the carbonation level right.

Finally, I'd really like to try brewing a really big stout - possibly the 1914 Courage Imperial from Ron P's blog. I'd have to do two mashes and two boils to get a full fermenter of the stuff, but it'd be worth it to have a nice big beer to drink over winter.

Friday, 7 July 2017

The topic for this months Session, hosted by Mark Lindner at By The Barrel is SMaSH beers - Single Malt and Single Hop.

The first thing that I'd say here is that as far as I'm concerned, SMaSH is very much a learning tool for brewing rather than a trend that particularly interests me as a drinker - and in fact, while single hopped beers are fairly common, I can't ever remember having seen a commercial beer that made a virtue of its single-maltedness.

As a bit of homebrew pedagogy, thought, it seems to have a lot of traction; searching homebrew forums will turn up dozens of threads on suitable combinations and recipes for SMaSH brews. The reasons for this popularity are fairly clear - it's a simple formula to remember, it has a catchy name, it's got obvious learning value, and it steers the brewer clear of a number of recipe-building pitfalls while encouraging them to focus on the fundamentals of producing a good, clean, balanced beer.

What's interesting, though, is that this is generally the only expressly "educational" style of recipe that people use, and it's obviously limited in its scope. We conduct methodical explorations of Maris Otter and Pilsner malt, or Goldings and Cascade, but when it comes to roast and amber malts, sugars and yeast, we still tend to bash on haphazardly on a basis of "well, I brewed a thing with it once that came out well..."

If I ever published a book on homebrewing - something that might take a while, as it'd require me to become at least vaguely competent first - it'd be a book of recipes. Or rather, a book of families of recipes. Each one would have a basic version, which would be reliable, simple and bordering on bland, but then a series of variations, each of which would put a different ingredient under the spotlight. So a malty bitter might be used to learn about different varieties and grades of amber and crystal malts, a pale Belgian ale could be a good starting point for trying out different brewing sugars, and a clean American IPA grist would provide an obvious base to experiment with New World hops.

It's obviously possible to work towards this sort of approach as a novice homebrewer, but it's slowed down by the fact that even reliable basic recipes take a while to work out at this stage, and picking suitable quantities for your more exotic additions is bit of a shot in the dark.

So if anyone is thinking of writing a homebrew book, this is one that I'd buy! And if anyone isn't thinking of writing a book, but has recipes that they use in this way, then I'd love to hear about them.

Tuesday, 30 May 2017

You can imagine the similar conversations happening in the board rooms of regional breweries up and down the country.

"We ought to start up a craft brand." says blazered chap number one. "Tap into the youth market."

"I think you might be onto something." says blazered chap number two. "I'll get one of the junior brewers to start cooking up something with blueberries and bacon or what have you - I hear these young crafty types love that sort of thing."

"Good feller. I'll get the marketing lads on to sketching up a few cartoon skulls."

...because if there are two things that even blazered chaps know about British craft breweries, it's that they love their wacky cartoon skulls, and that they can't brew a straightforward stout without barrel aging it on a couple of hundredweight of jammy dodgers or something.

Except, of course, that they don't and they can.

Cartoon skulls are mostly a generalization from Beavertown, I think, although they also feature heavily in Weird Beard's branding. Tiny Rebel have a beaten up cartoon teddy for a mascot, and Magic Rock have their cast of circus characters. Partizan tend to the cartoonish, maybe, although even they feel like a stretch. But try to go further than that and you quickly realize that they're the exception rather than the rule. Look at the Kernel, Brew By Numbers, Fourpure, Marble, Thornbridge, Buxton, Cloudwater, Northern Monk, Lost and Grounded, Siren, Moor, Wild Beer, Five Points, Vocation, Brewdog... they've all got strong graphic identities, but cartoon skulls and other similarly "wacky" imagery is thin on the ground.

It's rather easier to see where the "maple bacon IPA" thing comes from. It's undeniable that new-wave British craft breweries don't trouble themselves too much with prescriptivist ideas about what "doesn't belong" in beer, and it's often the weirder stuff that grabs attention at beer festivals and gets Twitter and Instagram buzzing. But again, once you actually start looking, you find that virtually every British craft brewery builds its range around pale ales, amber ales, stouts, porters and lagers.

Like most myths, then, these two are less about what's actually true and more about giving us a simple, satisfying view of the world. They tell us that craft brewers are the polar opposite of their more traditional cousins; they're wacky and irreverent, they love novelty and experimentation but they perhaps lack a bit of respect for tradition and have a weakness for novelty and brashness over nuance and subtlety. But fortunately - as with most myths - the reality turns out to be a bit more complicated and interesting than that.

(This post builds on an idea from Boak and Bailey. Technically I guess it's a bit of a stretch for the concept - I doubt that anyone really considers cartoon skulls to be a nemesis as such - but it's an interestingly persistent myth nonetheless. Also, this post isn't meant to be a riposte to Barm's ECBF writeup or anything - that link was a serendipitous late addition to something that was basically already finished.)

Thursday, 20 April 2017

I don't often do beer tourism as such, but somehow my normal tourism ends up taking me to a lot of places with good beer. And normally when that happens, it's easy to know what to do to be impressed. Visiting New York and New England with my partner, we tried fresh local IPAs, and American classics that seldom make it across the Atlantic. In new bits of the UK, we go to classic pubs and seek out exciting local microbreweries. In Dusseldorf, we spent evenings in Uerige and Schumacher, soaking up the atmosphere and enjoying the company with their perfect, balanced session beers forming a backdrop rather than a focus.

Now she's spending a few months in Brussels for work, and thanks to the wonders of remote working I'm getting to spend a fair bit of time over there too. This is obviously pretty cool, but with the amount of Belgian beer that turns up in the UK these days, I found it surprisingly easy to be disappointed by the reality of a night out there. You go into a well thought-of bar, start leafing through a long list of bottled beers, and realize that most of them are actually pretty easy to get hold of back home. Swerving the wallet-busting bottles of vintage gueuze, you pick something sensibly priced that you've never heard of. When it arrives, it turns out to be a nondescript sugary blonde brewed to order for a beer marketer, or a slightly rough-edged take on a US pale from some local craft hopefuls.

After a few slightly unsatisfying experiences like this, I've come to suspect that over an evening drinking beer in Brussels, you normally have to pick two out of unusual, affordable, and consistently great. And once you accept that, you seem to end up with three basic approaches that you can take if you want a satisfying beery night out.

Splash out on vintage lambics

It'll cost you, but an evening picking from the vintage bottle list in a bar like Moeder Lambic is an experience the like of which you won't get in many places on earth. If it helps, try to remind yourself that wine buffs probably have it even worse. Going mob-handed and sharing bottles also softens the hit a bit.

If you're the sort of person who thinks that spending 50 Euros on a 75cl bottle of beer is a reasonable thing to do then you'll probably already know where to do it, but just for completeness, the obvious options are to head to either of the Moeders, visit Cantillon during the day, get dinner at Nuetnigenough, or take a trip out of town to De Heeren van Liedekercke, Grote Dorst or the Lambik-O-Droom.

Explore new micros

My experience of the newer small breweries in Belgium so far has been that they sometimes do great stuff, but don't have a particularly greater hit rate than similar breweries anywhere else. There do seem to be some gems, though.

I'm not so hot on this routine but again, either of the Moeders (but sticking to the draughts this time) or Nuetnigenough seem like good bets.

Immerse yourself in the classics

Possibly my favourite option. Sure, you probably can go to an adequately beer-geeky pub in the UK and find beers like Rochefort 10, Drei Fonteinen's Oude Gueuze, Dupont's Bonnes Voeux, De La Senne's Taras Boulba or De Dolle's Oerbier. But unless you're particularly well-off, any one of them is likely to feel like a treat - something that you splash out on after a few more sensible rounds. One joy of drinking in Belgium is that you can spend an evening wandering through these sorts of classic as the fancy takes you, knowing that at about four Euros each, none of them are going to break the bank.

If you're having dinner, Bier Circus and La Porteuse d'Eau have a lot of classic stuff. For drinking only, La Porte Noire, La Brocante (daytime only) and Pochenellekelder are obvious choices in the centre, while Amere a Boire is a hidden gem that's well worth a visit if you happen too be down South in Ixelles.

A few more ramblings...

Young Lambic

Okay, so there is one thing you can do that's affordable, unique and consistently pretty great, and that's drinking draught young lambic. On the other hand, I normally find that after a glass or two in Moeder I start wandering off into the rest of the draught list, or asking for the bottle menu...

Delerium

Delerium Cafe is one of the more famous beer bars in Brussels, and its subsidiary branches are turning into quite a chain. But although it's a well known beer-destination, it's conspicuous by it's absence from any of these lists. This is basically because I've only been in on a Friday night, at which point it was so overcrowded and understaffed that we rapidly got fed up and left after our first beer, so I don't really feel like I had a chance to figure out what it was about. I might try again on a Tuesday morning or something.

Why?

I think the difficulty of reliably picking good, new, cheap stuff in Belgium is partly down to the tendency of most established Belgian brewers to focus quite hard on a small core range of beers. This is part of what makes them so good, but it does also mean that you're relatively unlikely to come across a beer you haven't tried from a brewery that you know and trust, which in turn means that unless you spend the whole time flicking through a book or fiddling with your phone, trying a new beer is more likely to involve taking a punt on an unknown brewery.

Disclaimer

I'm not claiming to be an expert on the Belgian beer scene. These ramblings are based on a bit of background research and a few weeks spent living and drinking in Brussels. If I've missed anything out, please suggest it in the comments. If you think I'm spouting crap, please try to break it to me gently.

Further Reading

My starting point for exploring has been Tim Web and Joe Stange's superb Good Beer Guide Belgium, plus Ratebeer's top places for Brussels and the Brussels Beers and Bites blog.

Tuesday, 28 March 2017

Living in Cambridge, I like to go to the Elm Tree for their Belgian beers. For the UK, they have a seriously good range, albeit at Cambridgey prices. A travelling Belgian in search of British beer culture, however, might be better advised to try a pint of Banks & Taylors or Eagle IPA there, unless they were getting homesick.

I also go to the Carpenters Arms or the Haymakers for their pizza. They're both pretty good, but I wouldn't expect either to be high on the hit list of a visiting Neapoliton.

Another regular haunt is the Pint Shop, which has pretty much the only really solid lineup of new-wave keg in Cambridge. On the other hand, it's often London-craft-lite, and a Londoner planning a special trip might do better to save themself the train fare from Kings Cross and stop at the Craft Beer Co or the Euston Tap instead.

And it goes on. Curries, burgers, German beers, American beers - there are plenty of places that I go to in Cambridge that would hold very little interest for a visiting connoisseur, but which fill a niche as the best-of-breed locally, and which are great to have around when you want that sort of thing.

So when I see Brewdog in Brussels, or a trendy burger joint in Paris, or an outpost of Craftopia in Munich, I keep this in mind, and resist the temptation to sniff at it. Sure, I might pass it by myself, but I'm not the target market here.

Note: this post was inspired by a recent Zythophile post, although it's more going off on a tangent rather than having a pop at Martyn.

I don't really know much about pre-Thornbridge innovations in pale-and-hoppy, let alone the earlier waves of microbrewing, so apart from a tentative proposal that Hophead was significant, I'm going to stick to the last ten years or so. To keep it simple, I've also ignored influential beers from outside what is normally considered to be the "craft scene" - the surviving barleywines and Imperial Stouts from traditional family brewers, for instance. But then, I'm well under 25 beers here, so someone else can fill in those bits.

The major development of this era was large numbers of British brewers starting to be directly influenced by their American counterparts, so genuinely influential British beers become harder to spot. A lot of "milestone" beers were just the first British instances of styles that many people were already well aware of, so they arguably didn't blown minds in the same way that earlier innovations might have done.

With that out of the way, here are seven suggestions.

Thornbridge - Jaipur (2005)

There's really not much to say here that hasn't already been said!

Marble - Lagonda (2005)

The West-of-the-Pennines counterweight to Jaipur. I haven't really drunk much of it, but this was presumably fairly important in the establishment of Manchester as a craft hub?

Brewdog - Tactical Nuclear Penguin (2009)

Punk may be the big seller, but TNP was the big, silly, headline grabbing beer that really let the world in general know how far apart Brewdog stood from traditional real ale culture.

The Kernel - various pales and IPAs (early 2010)

Pretty much the prototype for the London Murky style of IPA, which feels like an important and (at the time) distinctively British innovation. The Kernel were also significant for being one of the first brewers to feel like they were primarily aimed at craft beer geeks rather than going for a wider audience - something which in turn signals the fact that there were suddenly enough craft beer geeks for that to be a viable business plan.

The Kernel - Export Stout London 1890 (2010)

How many qualifications need sticking on the sentence "the first example of a revived historic recipe" is a free blog post idea if anyone wants it, but London 1890 certainly feels significant in terms of popular interest in the idea.

Burning Sky - Saison a la Provision (2013)

This feels like another new current emerging - the arrival of a major brewery that makes a feature of slow aging and seasonal ingredients and situates itself at arms length from the urban modernism that characterizes a lot of the scene. Their flagship oak-aged bretted saison seems to embody that particularly well.

Cloudwater - DIPA series (2015 onwards)

Finally, it seems daft to make claims of influence for a series of beers that have only been around for a couple of years, but the buzz around Cloudwater's Double IPA series means that they can't help feeling like a landmark in terms of collective self-confidence.

So that's my list. But as has been pointed out elsewhere, without fairly extensive research these things will be strongly dependent on one's personal perspective, so I'd welcome any alternative suggestions in the comments below.

Tuesday, 17 January 2017

There's been a lot of talk recently about the price and reliability of cask ale and about the breweries getting out of that particular game, but all that's getting a bit boring by now so I thought I'd write up a slightly self-indulgent slice of homebrewing life instead.

I don't know how detailed other peoples' medium-term brewing plans are, but personally I tend to have a sort of semi-formalized mental list of things I'd like to get around to brewing at some point. The ideas can be based on wanting something similar to a commercial beer that I've drunk, or on ingredients, styles or techniques that I'd be interested to try out, while the actual list varies from day to day, and only occasionally actually gets written down.

For context, my most recent brews have been as follows:

An American Pale Ale. Mostly Golden Promise with 6% each of medium crystal and wheat. 1.048 OG, 46 IBU with a reasonable whack of Galaxy and Amarillo late in the boil and Citra dry hop. Successful brew, drinking very nicely.

A Foreign Extra Stout. Made from Golden Promise again, with about 5% each of Brown Malt, Carafa II, Medium Crystal and Special B. 1.064 OG, hopped to 37 IBU with Challenger, no late hops. Finished up at about 1.020. Drinkable but on the sweet side compared to what I was aiming for.

A strong Ruby Mild. Based on the Graham Wheeler version of Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby - Golden Promise and various crystal malts to 1.059 OG, hopped to 32 IBU with a bit of Challenger chucked in at 10 mins. This was a challenging brew - the original yeast conked out too soon, some replacement yeast left it too dry, and there might have been a hint of something funky in a few of the bottles that I've tried so far. Plus the colour is more "mid amber" than "dark ruby"!

And in the fermenter at the moment is an American Amber Ale - A variation on the American Pale, but with Simpsons Lager Malt as a base, their Double Roast Crystal substituted for the medium crystal, dialed back IBUs, and citra and chinook hops for aroma.

Now, part of my reason for homebrewing is to have a steady supply of easy drinking light-to-medium coloured ales that I can break out at social occasions without losing too many friends. The possibly-shonky Dark Ruby Mild and the sweet and sticky Foreign Extra Stout have left me short stacked in that department, so I'm playing it fairly safe with the current brew, and will do the same with the next one - probably another bash at the Dark Ruby but with a few grams of Carafa added for colour and a more dependable yeast used from the start.

After that, I've got a number of ideas bouncing around:

A Euro-hopped American Blonde. Possibly with Vienna malt? This would be interesting to try, because I don't really know much about European hops. It'd also be an interesting test of how my process is coming on, since any flaws are likely to be glaringly obvious, but that also makes it a relatively high-risk option.

A Red Rye IPA. I generally like this style, haven't brewed it before, and have Chinook, Mosaic and Simcoe hops sitting around which should go well.

A Mirto Milk Stout. I'm not normally into sticking weird stuff into beer, but a milk stout with Kentish hops and Sardinian dried myrtle berries seems like it'd be a nice nod to my baby nephew's mixed heritage as he comes up to his first birthday.

More variations on the Dark Ruby Mild recipe. I think this might be a good basis for experimenting with sugars and with interesting speciality malts. I'm particulary tempted to try brewing it with a smidgeon of smoked malt, if only for the name The Ruby in the Smoke.